BuildData
New Business Leads
in Canada
If you sell to new businesses, there are two moments worth knowing about: the week a business opens, and the months before it opens while it is still choosing who to buy from. BuildData publishes both, from the cities' own records, as a spreadsheet in your inbox every week.
New business openings
Every business the first time a city licensed it, with renewals stripped out so an opening is counted once. 292,573 businesses across 19 cities.
- Business name, address, city, province
- Category and licence type
- The date it opened
- Whether a building permit preceded it, with that permit's date, type and value
- Months from permit to opening
- Latitude and longitude
Businesses opening soon
Addresses with a fit-out permit and no active business licence. Construction is happening where nobody is licensed to trade, which means something is opening there. About 1,500 addresses across 9 cities.
- Address, city, province, coordinates
- Permit date, type, value and the city's description
- No business name, because the name does not exist yet
- About 30 new addresses a week nationally
- Alberta, Ontario, BC and Nova Scotia only
Which one you want
Most people ask for both and then keep one. The honest way to choose is by what you sell and how long the decision takes.
| New openings | Opening soon | |
|---|---|---|
| Business name | Yes | No, it is not public yet |
| Timing | The week it opened | Weeks to months before it opens |
| Coverage | 19 cities | 9 cities |
| Volume | 292,573 businesses on file | ~1,500 live, ~30 new a week |
| Best for | Anything bought after the doors open: supply, cleaning, delivery, marketing, ongoing services | Anything bought during the build: signage, fit-out trades, point of sale, insurance, equipment |
| Risk | Someone got there first | A share of these never open, and you are calling a site not a company |
Where the data comes from
Municipal open data, nothing else. Cities publish their business licence rolls and their building permits. BuildData pulls both every day, normalizes the addresses so the two sides can be joined, geocodes them, and works out which licence is a first licence rather than a renewal. That last step is the one most licence datasets skip, which is why they read as tens of thousands of openings a month when the real number is a fraction of that.
There is no personal data in any of this. No contact names, no phone numbers, no email addresses, no scraped profiles. Business name, address, category, licence type and dates, all of it already public, is what a row is.
What a row looks like
Who this is for
Signage and print
Storefront signage is quoted during the build and ordered before opening day. The opening-soon list is the one that matters here, and the permit value tells you the size of the job.
Point of sale, payments, insurance
Bought once, early, then renewed for years. Reaching the operator during the fit-out is the difference between winning the account and trying to displace someone later.
Commercial cleaning and facilities
Contracted in the first weeks of trading. The openings feed, filtered to your category and your service radius, is a call list.
Suppliers and distributors
A new restaurant, salon or shop has no incumbent supplier. Category and opening date tell you which ones are still deciding.
Banks, brokers, accountants
Business banking, leasing and bookkeeping are picked in the first month. Openings with a large preceding permit are the ones with capital behind them.
Commercial real estate and research
What is filling ground-floor space, by category and by month, from the city record rather than from a survey. Both lists together give you a pipeline and a completion rate.
Cities in the feed
Openings ship as one national feed, so every city below arrives in the same weekly workbook. There is nothing to pick and no per-city price: Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Victoria, Burnaby, Coquitlam, Longueuil, Sudbury, Kitchener, Lethbridge, Red Deer, Niagara Falls, Prince George, New Westminster, Maple Ridge, Langley Township and Squamish.
Build the openings feed → · See every covered city →
Questions
Is a business licence roll not the same thing?
No. A city issues a licence every year a business stays open, so a licence roll is mostly renewals. Sold as new businesses it will tell you a twenty-year-old hardware store just opened. The openings dataset keys on the earliest licence a business ever held in that city, so a renewal stays a renewal.
Why is opening-soon only 9 cities when openings is 19?
It needs both halves from the same city, a permit feed and a licence roll, published with enough address detail to join them. Most cities publish one or the other. We would rather say nine than pad the list. Full detail on the opening soon page.
Can I take both?
Yes, as two feeds. Each dataset is its own $49 per month subscription, and they work well together: an address moves off the opening-soon list and onto the openings list when the licence is issued, so you can follow the same site through both.
Can I filter it to my category or a minimum permit value?
The self-serve builder covers dataset and cities. If you want it cut to a category, a value threshold or a keyword, tell us what you sell and we will scope a custom feed.
Is there an API instead of a spreadsheet?
Yes. Both datasets are on the openings API and the opening_soon endpoint, on the same key and the same schema as building permits.
Pick a list and start the trial
30 days free, then $49 CAD per month. Cancel from the link in any email.
Part of the BuildData Canadian construction data platform. Also available: building permit feeds, business licences, see all coverage.